Destroying Myself in the Process
by worsethanademon
Summary: Sam's always been the freak (an examination of Sam's life from childhood through his time at Stanford).
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

John and Dean were hunched over the trunk, making sure all the weapons were in order, organized, and clean before they headed out. Sam stood to the side, a gun filled with rock salt bullets gripped tightly by anxious white knuckles and a bag of salt held in place on his shoulder by the other hand. "Dad," Sam ventured quietly, his voice soft as to not disturb his paranoid-with-the-prospect-of-a-new-hunt father, "where do you want this salt?"

The oldest hunter merely grunted in response, still busy muttering under his breath to Dean about the upcoming hunt. The youngest son sighed softly, making his long bangs float up away from his forehead for a few seconds. His shoulder was starting to go numb, but he had barely started opening his mouth to ask again when a glance at the expression on his father's face stopped that particular plan of action dead in its tracks.

Sam shifted uneasily, the loose gravel beneath his feet crunching and popping with even the slightest of movements. The door to the small house they had rented for their short stay in Four Oaks was still slightly ajar, so he set the bag of salt against the Impala and went to go shut it completely. For two people so concerned with safety and constant vigilance, they sure made a lot of careless mistakes when they forgot that sometimes they had to play by the rules of the real world, that there are things out there besides monsters and demons that were able to do just as much if not more damage. Sometimes his brother and father were so swept into a hunt that they forgot the reason hunting was worth all the pain and life on the road: the civilians that would still have normal lives thanks to the Winchesters.

A biting wind was starting to stir in the winter air and it cut right through the layers Sam had on. An undershirt, a threadbare button-down, and a hand-me-down jacket were no match against a 25° wind chill. Still, at least they wouldn't be trying to hunt in a near-blizzard that limited their visibility or trying to sprint over patches of ice without twisting their ankles (that had been one of his least favorite hunts).

A bird landed gracefully in a nearby tree, causing a slight crack of brittle leaves and branches to ripple through the air, barely audible. John snapped his head up, though, pausing whatever he had been telling his oldest son mid-sentence. Figures that he would hear the rustling of a bird in a tree and be immediately attentive, but the questions of his youngest would fall on deaf ears.

Suppressing a sigh that wanted to escape from his mouth, Sam opened the door to the back seat of the Impala and set his burden on one side and sat in the other. The soft whispers outside continued for a few minutes. The slamming of the trunk that sent vibrations through the whole car and the stomping of heavy feet outside signaled the return of his dad and brother.

"Sam," John asked in his gruff but low, measured voice that was the usual when addressing his kids, "do you have the salt?"

"Yes, sir," Sam replied softly, wanting more than anything to be inside curled up next to a heater instead of sitting stiffly in a frigid car on seats that may as well have been made of ice.

The Impala started with a rumble of the engine and the small family of three was carried down the road. Dean turned on the radio, and some old rock song (they were all blurring together, all the tunes that were just another background noise in their lives) came blaring through the speakers until it was turned down with nothing more than a stern glare from John. Sam pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching in a detached sort of fascination as his breath left little droplets of condensation until nothing more than the blurriest of outlines could be seen through it. He had to suppress the childish urge to draw pictures and sloppily trace his name in the remnants of the ghost of his breath. It reminded him of a day that felt like a lifetime ago, but in reality hadn't been more than four or five years, where he had gone a class trip on the bus to a Christmas tree farm with his classmates. All of the members of his class had chattered away happily, sipping hot chocolate on the bus and he had felt included, part of a community. At eight, they were still too young to have started deciding that they didn't want to hang out with freaky, rail-thin new kids in tattered clothing and who didn't seem to talk more than necessary. They were still too naïve and free of the stereotypes of the United States that kept him isolated from his now-older classmates.

He had read his dad's journal eight days later and everything had changed, but in actuality not much had changed at all.

The heating in the Impala was finally starting to kick in and Sam's shivering gradually decreased until he could force himself to be still. His hands still felt like icicles rather than moveable limbs and he wasn't sure if his feet were ever going to get the feeling back in them, but at least it was bearable. The sun continued to set in the bleak grey sky until there was nothing left but inky blackness and the faint light of a few distant stars that were willing to brave the cold. Sam loved cold weather and everything about it. Cold air had a smell to it that made him feel alive in a way nothing else could and the quiet stillness associated with winter surely put him more at ease than he thought a whispered "I love you" for no reason other than to say it could, but he wasn't entirely sure.

A large neighborhood was up ahead and the Christmas lights adorning the suburban lawns acted as a beacon for the Winchester family. When your life starts blurring together into backwater towns, greasy diner foods, and cheap motel rooms it becomes easy to forget to pretend to remember trivial dates and events.

There was one desolate house that seemed abandoned, sticking out like a knife buried in the sea of lights and festivity. Funny that that's where John parked the Impala, on the cracked driveway that hadn't been used in years if the faded and discolored for sale sign in the front yard meant anything. The outcasts of a group always seemed to have a way of finding each other, apparently even when one of them was an inanimate object. Even in this neighborhood on a cold November night they couldn't do anything that appeared normal on the surface, if only for a few minutes.

It turned out that it was the two-story, baby blue house two doors over that they were watching, though, the one with the outline of a Christmas tree with colored lights visible behind their flowy white curtains and the sounds of wind chimes clanging in their backyard. There was something soothing in the resounding ring of them, the way that they cut through the howling wind and turned it into a thing of beauty just slightly tainted with an air of melancholy.

John's voice demanded attention with a bark, and Sam looked up, waiting for instructions. "Sam, you know what to do. Keep the car door locked and stay inside. We'll be back in a few hours. Dean, let's go."

Dean shot a sympathetic look that danced in his bright green eyes and a warm smile back at his brother before following his dad out of the car, always the perfect little soldier that his dad wanted both of his sons to be. Their voices grew fainter as they walked down the street away from Sam, their heads bent down as they trudged along against the wind until their voices blended into the howling wind and became indiscernible.

The two eldest members of the Winchester family had been trying to track down this creature for the better part of two weeks, and Sam, who had been sidelined to research duty because of his age and the dangerous nature of the creature they were hunting, had managed to pinpoint where it was headed to somewhere in this neighborhood, and John had been able to narrow it down to a single house the previous night. They were still unsure exactly what species it was or why it was in this neighborhood, but it had caused a few house fires, which had instantly set off the series of alarms that seemed to always be set and waiting to be triggered in John's head and caused the family to be uprooted from a hunt they were in the middle of in bright, sunny California to North Carolina in a long four-day, continuous road trip.

Road trips in the Winchester family weren't events one would call relaxing in any sense of the term.

The car always had the slight odor of old more-grease-than-potato french fries and stale burgers that never quite seemed to go away. Sam breathed in deeply through his nose and held his breath for a few seconds before exhaling shakily. The worst part of hunts were the waiting, the not knowing if this was going to be the one where somebody slipped up and their family of three became one of two. Dean had just been allowed to make his first kill a few months previously, a werewolf of all things, but they had both been tagging along on hunts to serve as backup for years. Dean had started going along when he was 14 and Sam no longer needed a babysitter to make sure he didn't do something stupid like blow up the microwave while alone in the motel room, and Sam had started hunting not long after, only 10 years old when he helped dig up a grave for his first salt and burn.

A scream pierced through the night air, sending a chill through Sam's body that was in no way the fault of the weather. Another shout followed, and the distant flickering light of flames in the window of the house two doors down was now visible from the Impala, only slightly shrouded by a large oak tree in his line of sight, a tire swinging back and forth slowly, oblivious to the events unfolding in the house behind it.

His worn sneakers tapped up and down in the dance of the anxious on the floor of the Impala. The window's glass sounded hollow when tapped by fingernails and the distant sound of fire engines were carried away by the wind. A door creaked open, a neighbor checking to see what the ruckus was about, just a pair of eyes and a glimpse of a grey t-shirt before it was quickly snapped shut. For every good samaritan that existed in the world, there was another who just didn't want to get involved, justifying it in their head with whatever reasons they could conjure up so that they still feel good about themselves when they went to bed at the end of each day.

The door to the burning house opened. Sam could see the outline of his brother helping somebody who appeared to be a young woman, probably about 30, out of the house. With each deep, heaving cough of his brother, Sam could feel an overwhelming need to run over there to help in any way he could rise inside of him, but he didn't want to jeopardize anything his father was planning to do and risk getting a civilian or a member of his family killed. But, God, it sounded like he was trying to cough up his entire lung.

Sam blew a breath out, slowly, letting it leak out from in between his pursed lips in the way that his air mattress set up on the musty carpet of their hotel room had been deflating for days now. His front teeth dug into his bottom lip and he was only able to force himself to stop when the metallic taste and smell of blood overwhelmed his senses a few seconds later. His brother was still bent over at the waist on the lawn, his chest heaving up and down like it was a monumental effort just to suck in a breath of air, which, Sam realized, it probably was.

He gulped in breaths in time with his brother, feeling his own throat constricting and the heat rising in his stomach, overwhelming him even though he had been shivering not even five minutes previously and the all too familiar claws of panic that seemed to be associated with his family in danger tearing their way through his insides, leaving him a metaphorically bloody mess. Sam gave it another twenty seconds, he honestly did, until he started to go light-headed and felt like he was going to float away I he didn't do something _fast_ and, damn it, he just couldn't do this anymore.

Nobody noticed the scrawny kid slipping out of the back door of the sleek black car that was sitting on outskirts of the scene of destruction and flames. Not a single person in the group of concerned neighbors huddled away from the danger of the scene saw, and if they had they pretended not to, the fiery steel in the twelve-year-old's eyes as he strode over to the house. His dad and who knew how many civilians were still in there. Sam wasn't stupid nor was he suicidal, but it didn't seem right to leave people to burn. He'd had more than enough fire marking his life and if there was a chance he could help to stop one before it did more damage than burning down a suburban home, he would take it. Sam wasn't able to just stand by and let another family go up in flames.

His steps faltered as he tried to take his first step inside the house. John would hand him his ass on a plate for disobeying orders, if he even got out alive, that is, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if somebody got hurt because he was too much of a wimp to save them. It all came down to what was worse: his family being mad at him for trying to do the right thing, for trying to embrace the family business or him being mad at himself and people getting killed in the process. When it all came down to it, there really was no contest.

As he opened the door a crack, trying to blend in with his surroundings so that some well-meaning, pesky neighbor wouldn't call out about the kid sneaking into the front door of the burning house, memories of a firefighter coming in to lecture one of the first grade classes he was in and how at the time he had nodded his head along with all the other six-year-olds filled his head.

The firefighter had come to the little North Dakota classroom dressed in his full gear, complete with a short piece of an old water hose to let the kids play with in tow. He had passed out little coloring books and cheap three-packs of crayons that seemed to snap the second any pressure was applied to the tip. Sam had gotten blue, green, and black. He remembered sitting there utterly baffled as to why the silly adult would give him those colors when all the pictures were of orange and yellow fire and bright red fire trucks. The girl next to him had gotten all the fiery colors, but she had refused to share. Her name had been Diana, and she had sat on the red crayon and had broken it in the process, just so Sam wouldn't get a turn.

His class had been forced to stand in a line on the lawn of the school, though it had been great fun in their young minds, and practice stopping, dropping, and rolling. Sam, ever the blunt child, had informed the teacher that his mom died in a fire with a solemn face so that this was super extra important for him to learn. He hadn't understood at the time why for the remaining few weeks Sam had been at the school the teacher, Ms. Greenley, had kept slipping him little sweets and toys. The last word of advice the fireman had given before leaving had been, "Never go back into a fire once you're out. Your lives are more important than your teddy bear or toys."

Sam let out a quick breath of air through his nose that resembled a half-laugh. His first grade teacher would have been so disappointed in him. The heavy oak door opened outwards to reveal the narrow hallway inside the house. There was a bin overflowing with shoes to his left and on his right there was a coat rack. From what he could tell there was a small child, probably about a year old judging from the size of their shoes, and an older little boy, as well as two parents in the house. The only person that had managed to get out with the help of Dean so far was the mom, assuming that the rest of the family was actually home (and wouldn't that be a horrendously embarrassing mistake?).

The upstairs floorboards were creaking and groaning, though it was impossible to tell if it was because of people running across them or if it was just the structure of the house weakening in the fire and starting to collapse. His brilliant, heroic plan all of a sudden wasn't looking as great as he originally thought it to be. Still, Sam swiftly made his way through the downstairs of the house and found nothing out of place or strange. The quaint little living room had a couch and recliner in front of a decent-sized television and a fireplace to top it all off. The fire had to be upstairs and the thumping was getting louder with each second, a faraway sound that could have been voices, muffled screams, or just the wind serving as a background. Sam found that for as curious as he usually was about anything and everything going on around him, he really didn't want to know.

There was a door on the far edge on the living room and, hey, at least he learned something about fire safety all those years ago, he placed the back of his hand against the door to test it for heat, but it felt as cold as the air outside. The stairs were steep and if he had taken more time to think everything through or worry about his own safety, he would have ascended them slowly and carefully as to not fall and break all the bones in his body. As it was, Sam sprinted up them three or four at a time.

It dawned on him that bursting into the house unarmed and without a plan other than to make sure nobody got killed wasn't his most intelligent move. He stumbled over a doll lying in the middle of the upstairs hallway, which made his concern heighten even more. If the kids were in fact home, they would be trapped in their bedrooms. All the doors on the hallway were shut tightly, as if the house itself were keeping the secret of whatever supernatural creature had caused the fire.

The first door opened to what looked like a playroom. It hadn't mattered anyway, all Sam noticed was the absence of people before moving on to the next. There was a suspicious absence of smoke in the hallway and he couldn't feel any heat. It was if whichever room the fire was in was sealed off from the rest of the world, impossible to penetrate. For a second Sam had considered the possibility that they may have had the wrong house, but both Dean and the woman outside were coughing and hacking and his dad hadn't walked out of the house.

The second door opening showed an outrageously pink room, adorned with a matching carpet, wall pain, bedspread, lamp, and dresser. A little girl who couldn't have been more than eight or nine was sitting on a rug with tears streaming down her cheeks, but there was no fire and she was very much alive and seemingly uninjured. There was no blood in a puddle around her and she was curled up in a ball and rocking back and forth without too much trouble.

"Hey," Sam said quietly, trying not to scare her, though his mind was already racing ahead. There was no signs of fire in the room and although he wasn't an expert, that didn't seem right. "What happened?"

The girl looked up, tears shining in her wide, blue-green puppy dog eyes. A few seconds passed until Sam was almost sure that she wasn't going to answer until she sniffled and her mouth opened, though her words were inaudible. When he just shot her a blank stare, the girl put a little more force behind her words, finally fully looking him in the eye. "I said," she clarified with a tone filled with exasperation that felt more than a little out of place in the middle of a scene straight out of a horror movie, "Mr. Hank was here. I let him in 'c-cuz mommy said not to be rude. But I didn't wanna. He had fire on him an' it hurt real b-bad when I touched it on accident."

She held up her right hand that she had been cradling to her chest and held it out for him to see. In the light it looked slightly red, though nothing worse than a person was able to get from accidentally touching a pan on the stove. Sam hushed the little girl in as much of a soothing manner as he could manage under stress and reassured gently, "Ok, ok. You're fine. What did you say your name was again?"

She looked up solemnly and her eyes looked too damn old to be so young. "I'm Katie. Where's my mom?"

"I don't know," Sam replied, and this seemed to be the only moment of his life where he wasn't too concerned to let his true emotions show. He let all of his bottled-up concern and compassion seep into his voice, making it warm and, hopefully, trusting. "I know this is difficult but is there anything else you can tell me about all of this?"

Katie opened her mouth to answer again, but was cut off by a shrill scream coming from somewhere else in the house. This was Sam's least favorite part of hunting, when you had to decide between two civilians or a civilian and the monster or anything involving the people they worked so hard to save potentially getting hurt. Sam pushed a loose strand of Katie's dirty blonde hair back from her grime-covered face and tucked it behind her ear. "All right, Katie, I'm so sorry to just leave like this, but I really have to go. You see, this is kind of my job. You need to go down the stairs and get outside away from the fire as fast as you can. Don't stop, and whatever you do, don't look back. Your mom should be waiting outside on the lawn."

She nodded and jumped up from the ground before walking out the door with a hurried grace that was unusual in younger kids. Her bare feet across the hardwood floor could be heard, followed by the groaning protests of the stairs. There were only two doors left on the hallway besides a bathroom. Sam opened the one closest to him. He wasn't sure whether to be thrilled or terrified when he saw the outline of his father standing by a window with the curtains drawn. His dad had a gun in hand, but wasn't particularly tense or alert.

Sam let himself relax minutely and tentatively call out, "Dad?"

John looked up with a start and his eyes widened for a second before they quickly narrowed, darkening when they landed on his youngest son standing in the doorway. "I told you to stay in the car, Sam," John growled, but his voice lacked its usual fierceness and intensity. It just sounded tired, defeated. Everything his dad wasn't.

"What was it, dad?" he asked, but the withering glare his dad shot him for it let him know that the question would have to wait until later when this hunt was in their rearview mirror, buried in the dust of the road and out of mind.

"C'mon, Sam."

Sam followed his dad down the stairs and out of the house, trying to dissolve into the background so that nobody would question why a grown man and twelve-year-old boy were casually walking out of a burning house that they didn't own, let alone the reason that they were both holding guns loaded with bullets made of rock salt. Sam had worked too many hours ensuring that their permanent, legal records were kept clean to have it all wasted because of one careless mistake of letting themselves be seen. He wanted his family to have the option of having a future in the real world, away from hunting, besides one spent in a life sentence at jail for seven counts of murder, hundreds of grave desecration, and more than a few breaking and entering charges.

An ambulance had come while they were inside the house, the piercing wail of the sirens having been dimmed and buried underneath the ringing of adrenaline in Sam's ears and the sound of his blood pulsing throughout his body. There was a fire truck parked in the road, though for some reason they were just sitting there in the driver and passenger seats, not even trying to do anything. Dean was in a heated discussion with one of the EMTs, though judging from the too-wide, innocent eyes, whatever Dean was saying was a blatant lie, but that was nothing new. The woman that Dean had led out of the house was receiving oxygen with the help of a few medical personnel, but it obviously wasn't serious enough to require an immediate transport to the nearest emergency room.

The woman was pointing at something and trying to talk through the oxygen mask that was covering her nose and mouth. Sam turned to follow her gaze. She was staring at her burning house, except the flames were gone. The only sign that they had ever been there was a small, black, charred hole on the roof above one of the rooms. There was no flames licking up the sides of the walls or tendrils of smoke curling up from the roof like there had been not even two minutes previously. Another scan of the yard showed the little girl he had told to get out, Katie, talking to some adult and waving her arms around with much ardor. It was only when she turned and locked eyes with him before pointing at him that Sam muttered a quick, "Shoot," under his breath and turned to his dad before saying, "Dad, I think we need to go. People are starting to get suspicious. But… dad, the flames are gone. What's going on? What was it?"

John wiped a hand down his face and sighed like the weight of the world was on his shoulders before taking Sam's arm in a tight grip and dragging him over to where Dean was now leaning against a tree, seemingly successful in his attempts to get the emergency workers to leave him alone. "C'mon, Dean, we're leaving," John barked without stopping to check if either of his sons were alright.

Dean snapped to attention, all of the looseness and softness seeping out of his body in one snapping motion. Until he saw Sam standing there, at least. "Sam? What the _hell_ are you doing here? We told you to stay in the car, damn it."

Sam nodded in return, too worn out to try to explain and defend himself, not that he would be able to at his very best anyway. The adrenaline was starting to wear off and he was definitely feeling it. All Sam wanted to do was go back to their motel (he supposed he wanted to go home, but that really didn't mean anything to the youngest Winchester) and sleep for twelve hours straight. He hadn't done much on the hunt besides run into a building and up a flight of stairs, but his leg muscles were still shaking and his eyes kept trying to drift shut without his permission. He was confused and exhausted and wanted to know what happened, but his dad wasn't too keen on opening up anytime soon. Sam would have been adamant that somebody had come in while he was sleeping the night before and replaced the flesh of his eyelids with heavy steel because he knew they hadn't been that heavy before if he wasn't living in a room that housed a family of hunters who all slept extremely lightly and with knives and guns tucked away under their pillows, in easy reach.

John already had the Impala running and was half backed out of the driveway when the brothers climbed into their seats. They were halfway down the street before they even had the chance to buckle their seatbelts. "What happened back there?" Dean asked their dad over the too-loud silence not filled with the usual rock music blaring from the car's speakers.

The only acknowledgment John gave that he had hears his son was to grip the steering wheel tightly, his scarred knuckles losing all color. The car lapsed back into its previous state of uncomfortable silence between the three men. Sam was drifting back to sleep, glad to let the dark blackness take him away from the fire and burning and look of complete misery on his father's face if only for an hour or so, his face once again pressed to the freezing window and his arms curled tightly around his body and his legs drawn up to tuck themselves underneath himself. He was as small as he could possible make himself and considering how short and skinny he was, it was pretty tiny. John spoke, his deep baritone seemingly reverberating from every molecule of the air, filling the car with a deep throaty, sound. "Why did you get out of the car, Sam?"

It was just a simple question that Sam was expected to answer with a simple statement followed by a standard polite 'sir' and then he was expected to sit through the reprimand he deserved and he'd probably have to run a few extra miles and do a couple hundred extra push-ups in their next training session. He'd done it all before so he was familiar with the drill to the point where it was just routine, but he had never openly defied such an explicit order before. Sam didn't know how to explain the feelings that were crashing around in his stomach, his throat, his mind, didn't know how to explain the way the glass shards of fear had snuck their way in and started slicing him up the inside, didn't think that they'd understand that the only thing that's scared him since he was first given a gun to learn how to protect himself were the images of his family members dying that seemed to never fully leave him. Sam stumbled over his words for a few minutes, stuttering and stammering and making himself look like a blubbering idiot in front of his family. "I don't know, sir." Sam ducked his head and filled his lungs with a deep breath, slowly and deliberately closing his eyes, preparing for the storm that was guaranteed to burst full force from his father at any moment. His dad was barely contained winds, lightning strikes, and crashing waves, the kind that destroyed houses and wreaked havoc on everything in its path (usually his own children).

Except, for once, it didn't. The storm never came, and the torrential downpour was held inside for another day, biding its time.

John simply nodded and turned to face the road again. Dean caught his in the rearview mirror and shot him a nasty glare, but didn't dare to say anything in front of their father. Pinpricks of light that could have been stars (or were they just street lamps?) were starting to blur together as his eyelids began to droop once again and the car gained speed as it reached the highway, and how messed up was it that stars billions of miles around, that these great big balls of gas that had the potential to kill all life but were also the only thing keeping the human race alive were nothing more than little dots that reminded Sam of the time he had caught the chicken pox? Little red bumps had dotted his skin for a week and it was itchy as painful as hell, and he had been upset for a little while that his dad hadn't bothered to get him vaccinated as an infant. He has spent most of his time with the sickness in the Impala, driving from New Mexico to Kansas, or was it New York to South Carolina? Thoughts and memories jumbled and blurred together until there was nothing recognizable in the mess that was his mind, and finally, _finally, _the thoughts gradually stopped plaguing his mind with their poison, leaving nothing but blankness.


	2. Chapter 2

Weeks passed, and school let out for the winter holiday (not that it really mattered, they would have moved on anyway). There were training sessions full of running and sparring and miles of road blurred together from the backseat of the Impala and Dean and John went after a vengeful spirit, but he was left home as punishment for disobeying orders on the last hunt. The school year started back up as soon as they settled in their new motel room in New York.

"All right, boys, up and at 'em. School starts today, and we wouldn't want some teacher getting too suspicious of us on our first day here." John's voice had a way of forcing itself into everything and breaking it, even dreams of hunts long past and hunts that would hopefully never actually happen. Sam jolted awake, and when he saw the alarm clock on the night stand next to his bed he groaned and pulled the pillow over his head to block out the artificial light shining from the lamp his dad had turned on.

Dean was already trying to get himself untangled from the cocoon of blankets on the other side of the bed the two brothers shared. John huffed over to Sam's side of the bed and tore the pillow from his hands and threw it on the floor. "Come on, boy. You need to get some more training in to get more in shape. I've been letting you slack a little bit, but no more. Let's go."

Sam grudgingly nodded. He threw the blankets off and rolled out of bed, gracefully landing on his feet and shaking his head to get his hair out of his eyes. John shook his head, pleased that even though his youngest son was too gentle for his own good and sometimes got distracted like he was a little kid in a field of flowers, he was stealthy and graceful, two traits that could make or break a hunter when it came down to it. Sam was still a shrimp for his age and John could admit to himself that it seemed like Sam was never going to grow any taller than his current four feet and five inches.

Dean had already claimed the bathroom for his own so Sam had to quickly slip on a pair of sweats and a hoodie in the middle of their room. By the time Dean was done, Sam already had his worn-out sneakers laced up and was waiting by the door. Their dad was waiting outside the motel room door for them. That was something that never changed for the Winchesters. The background changed every few weeks and the faces were different and unrecognizable everywhere they went, but every morning the Winchesters went on a morning jog (John's words. If it was up to Sam to name it, he would call it a sprint). That was how they judged when members of their family were safe enough to start going hunting again after an injury. As soon as they felt fit enough to go jogging, they were fit enough to go on a hunt.

It was still freezing and there were still patches of ice covering the ground, and there were wall-like snow drifts on either side of the road. The Winchesters took their jog at a slow pace because ankle injuries hurt like hell and took too long to heal for them to be willing to risk it. The air burned their lungs and made it so that they were unable to even keep up their usual banter that made running bearable. At the end of the four quick miles they did, maneuvering their way through the unfamiliar town and trying to find a nice route in the midst of abandoned roads and cracked sidewalks with weeds growing in between the cracks, usually like a walk in the park for them, even John looked like he was having trouble breathing in the frigid air.

The sun rise looked like it was straight from one of those postcards he always saw in the gas stations they passed through, absurdly out of place when framing the dump of a motel that they were staying at. Dean's school started an hour earlier than Sam's, so Dean wouldn't be able to give him a ride in the Impala to school, if dad would even let him take it, that is. Sam let his brother have the first shower while he tried to gather up whatever school supplies he could find and organized them to the best of his ability, tearing out long forgotten doodles of random things that he had seen out of some window in some classroom in some state or hastily scribbled notes to 'friends' in an effort to make them appear newer than they actually were.

Dean emerged from the bathroom, the entire lower half of his body not visible through the wave of steam that seemed to engulf him. Dean was already dressed in a pair of thick jeans, long sleeved over-shirt, and his favorite leather jacket that was eerily similar to the one John wore all the time. Sam handed him a backpack with a few necessary school supplies in it and Dean shot him a brief smile of thanks in return, grabbed a granola bar from the bottom of his duffle bag left over from the last place they stayed, and made his way out the door.

John was still doing who knows what at the table that seemed haphazardly crammed into their tiny room, bent over his thick journal, scribbling furiously. Sam wanted to ask what he was doing, but he knew his father would just feed him lies like he was a brainless, gullible pig that was desperate for intricately woven tales to believe about not knowing what they were hunting yet and that he was 'just thinking through the possibilities'. Besides, his dad would say, he was just a twelve-year-old and he wouldn't be able to do anything with the information if he was given it. Instead, Sam went to take a shower in their cramped bathroom in a stream of cold water that left him shivering and feeling worse afterwards than he had felt before.

Sam put on every layer he could find tucked away in the bottom of his duffel bag, but he was still chilled to the bone despite being tucked safely inside their slightly heated motel room. One glance at the digital clock on the nightstand sent him out the door without breakfast and his worn backpack on his shoulder. He found himself idly wishing that there would be a school bus waiting only a few blocks away to bring him to school like there had been a few schools ago.

He was able to actually get a good look at the town now that it wasn't bathed in the greyish light. All he had been able to see during their morning run were faint outlines of buildings, roofs piled high with snow and the occasional light of distant headlights from some unlucky commuter. It was a nice little town, by Winchester standards, anyway. There were a few people out walking dogs and chattering away, despite the below-freezing weather and piles of snow on the ground. There was a little grocery store and a ma and pa diner he had to pass on the way to school, and there were sidewalks almost the entire trip.

Clinton Middle was just an average school that could have been a number of the ones Sam had attended, just with a different scene in the background and a different name tacked above the doors. It was a medium-sized brick building with a huge lawn and what looked like sports fields out back, but it was hard to tell with the huge blanket of snow shrouding everything. Sam was almost up the path leading to the front door when he heard the faint ringing of a bell from inside the glass doors. He prayed to whatever was up there that it was just a warning bell. For somebody who warned his boys to never make a scene, John sure did make it difficult for them to blend in anywhere they went. Driving Dean to school so he would still in turn have the Impala to drive Sam to school would have been a nice place to start.

When his dad had registered he and Dean for school the previous day (how his dad managed to do it so quickly in each town despite their previous record was beyond Sam) they had printed out a schedule for him. It was fairly standard when compared to all the other middle schools in US, but one of his classes was Latin, which he had never taken in school before. This was going to be a day of trying to dumb himself down so nobody would get too suspicious as to why a twelve-year-old boy was nearly fluent in Latin and try to investigate. They had given him a locker number, too, but he didn't have time to try and find that yet.

He followed the room numbers on the walls, ignoring the stares of the few students who were still milling around in the hallway. He had learned the hard way too many times that no matter how sweet or innocent a group of middle-schoolers looked, their directions couldn't be trusted. They all thought that they were being inventive and clever with their brilliant prank idea, and didn't realize how obvious it was that they were lying even to the new kid when they would give directions and then the second the person turned their back they would burst into laughter. One time somebody had said, "Man, we really got him good" while Sam was still in earshot. Granted, he tended to be more in tune with his surroundings than most other kids his age because of all the training and hunting he did.

Room 457 was at the very end of the hall (figures). He pushed the heavy wooden door open gently and tried to slip in unnoticed because the walls were the same gross off-white color stained with who knows what in every school in the country and he had become somewhat of an expert at making himself blend into them, but it was seventh grade and the teacher was talking about Algebra. A fly buzzing around the room would have been more interesting than that, let alone a mysterious new kid walking in late, no matter how much Sam tried to shrink into himself. It was times like this that made Sam praise the high heavens that he was so short and scrawny.

An overly enthusiastic, bright young woman jumped up from her perch on the desk, her black heels clacking on the tile as she briskly walked over to where he was standing. "Hi!" she cooed, as if she were addressing a kindergartener (he couldn't stand teachers like this, the ones who pretended to care), "you must be Sam. I'm Ms. Bribton. Everybody," and she turned to face the sea of blank, zombie-like faces wearily staring at the front of the room, probably wishing that the teacher would stop talking so they could catch up on sleep, "this is Sam. Say hi to him."

The blank stare that was the only reply would have been comical if his face wasn't suddenly turning red and blushing furiously. He would have thought he would have gotten over his innate shyness years ago, after all the awkward situations he'd been placed in the middle of, but, nope, he was just as easily embarrassed as ever. The teacher's smile stretched even more and looked painfully wide and fake. "Alright then, Sam. Do you know where the media center is? You're going to go need to check out an Algebra textbook there and you may as well get the rest of your textbooks while you're at it."

Sam nodded mutely, and then turned back out to exit the room. He was halfway down the hall before he finally felt his lungs open up again and he could breathe. He always wanted to interact with people and once he found friends he loved talking to them, but he hated being singled out in front of a large group, or any group for that matter. He could talk anyone into anything, one of the few useful skills he had that he could contribute to the hunt, not that his dad let him very often, but when it came to the unique, complex, ever-changing social structure of tight-knit, small town schools, he was clueless, as much as he liked to humor himself otherwise.

The rest of the day went similarly, being introduced again in each class, sitting alone at the edge of a crowded table in the cafeteria during lunch, and having to say again and again where he was from. He usually would say he was from Kansas because it was easier than trying to explain their whole life story, but, screw it, they weren't going to be here long anyway and it was easier to just give a dismissive 'around'. If Sam were being honest with himself, it was kind of fun in its own messed-up way, being aloof like his brother, even though he didn't feel nearly as cool as his brother acted all the time. He usually tried to form connections to the best of his ability and get to know people, at least on the surface level, but he was finally starting to realize that there was no point.

Dean was waiting for him with the Impala in the still snowy parking lot after school. Sam cracked opened the passenger door and hurried inside and buckled his seatbelt as quickly as he could, relishing the heat blowing out of the vents and letting it warm his blood and bones. Usually he burned hot, sweating in the snow and stripping down to the barest of layers in the summer, but lately he had just been so damn cold all the time.

The motel room was empty and there was nothing in the fridge and Sam hadn't eaten anything at lunch because he had forgotten to ask his dad for money before he left for school. He got a glass of water and sat down at the table. He had already done the lessons they were learning three different times in other schools, but grades were grades and they were something he could change so he did his homework dutifully and efficiently. One thing about schoolwork is that no matter how much it seemed to change on the surface level, the content was always the same no matter if you were in Alabama or Washington and you only had to learn it once. It didn't change from day-to-day on a whim.

Dean brought their weapons bag to the table and they started cleaning and checking the weapons together. Usually their dad assigned jobs to them, but it's impossible to order people around when you're not even there. The sun set early and the shitty motel lighting didn't do much in the way of visibility.

The door finally cracked open long after Sam's stomach had stopped grumbling and had moved into cramping up in a way that made him want to bend over and hold his side and just stop breathing for a few blessed moments. John looked up, more than a little scruff decorating his chin and his hair greasy and in desperate need of a wash. "Let's go boys, fifteen minutes," he wearily sighed, rubbing a hand down his face in the all too familiar gesture that Sam was starting to associate with his father. "This hunt didn't pan out."

Sam opened his mouth to argue, but his dad looked too old and there were wrinkles on his face and around his eyes that Sam could have sworn hadn't been there a month ago and Dean looked like he was getting ready for another battle in the constant war between his only two remaining family members. It just wasn't worth it, so he nodded tightly, mumbled a "yes, sir" under his breath and went to pack his bags, resigning himself for another long night of no sleep curled up in the backseat of the Impala, Dean's rock music the only lullaby he'd ever known.

They were already fifty-seven miles down the highway before he realized that he still had the school's textbooks in his backpack, his homework for tomorrow already completed. _Maybe I'll need them to knock out a witch or something, _Sam thought dispassionately. He gave a little snort, but it wasn't all that funny. Dean gave him a strange look out of the corner of his eye, sizing up his younger brother, but they're Winchesters, damn it, and if they stopped to talk about every little slightly hysterical snort at inappropriate moments or tear or every complete fucking breakdown not much hunting would get done, and wasn't that the whole point? John just kept driving, paying more attention to the empty stretch of concrete ahead of him then he ever had to his children.


End file.
